Hitachi Ships 1TB Hard Disk Drive.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has started to ship its 1TB hard disk drives (HDDs) introduced early this year commercially. But the hard drive that represents a milestone in desktop data storage costs a little less than two times higher compared to slightly less capacious one, which makes it not very affordable.

Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 HDS721010KLA330 model features five 200GB platters and ten heads, has 7200rpm motor as well as 32MB data buffer. The manufacturer claims that the drive has 8.5ms read seek time, 9.2ms write seek time and 1070Mb/s (133.75MB/s) maximum media transfer rate. Currently the company ships 1TB hard disk drive with Serial ATA-300 interface, but a model with Parallel ATA interface is also expected to be available.

Hitachi’s 1TB hard disk drive indisputably represents a milestone in desktop storage, as only ten years ago the world’s most capacious hard disk drive was 16.7GB IBM Deskstar, whereas 1GB landmark in desktops was achieved in 1995. But, it appears, end-users will have to pay a significant premium to acquire the product that reached 1TB milestone.

Currently Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard disk drives with 1TB capacity are available in Japan for ?51 500 - ?55980 ($433 - $470), much higher compared to Seagate Barracuda 750GB, which retails for ?29400 - ?39660 ($247 - $333) in Tokyo, according to Akiba PC Hotline web-site. The recommended price of the 1TB drive from Hitachi for the U.S. is $399, whereas Seagate’s 750GB product costs starting from $249 in the country.